The Planet Explorers multiplayer game code has been accidentally deleted and the developers have determined that it would be infeasible for them to reconstruct it. As a result, they will be making the game free in the near future as they work towards releasing their next game.
If you haven't played Planet Explorers, it's a game that has an all too familiar premise: players get plopped down into a world that they can explore and deform however they like. In this particular case, the year is 2287 and one of Earth's first colony ships has crash-landed on a mysterious planet. Players must explore, gather materials, and build themselves a new home on a world filled with strange alien life.
It's certainly a premise that has been done before and some of the Steam reviews state that the game feels like it isn't entirely fleshed out. However, some others state that it was still plenty of fun despite the overall lack of polish on the product. A portion of the community surely enjoyed playing it with their friends, but that is no longer possible as the Planet Explorers multiplayer functionality has been permanently broken.
The game's lobby server somehow had its code irrevokably deleted according to the dev team in a news post on the game's Steam Community page. A software called "U-Link" was utilized in getting multiplayer working with this game but said software is now unfortunately defunct. Essentially, the developers would have to re-create a major portion of the game's code from scratch — and they don't have access to the original tools used to do it.
Consequently, the people of Pathea Games are going to be making Planet Explorers free starting next week. They're also going to be looking into if and how they can make the source code for the game publicly available.
In the meantime, Pathea Games will be working towards leveraging their experience into making Planet Explorers 2. If you'd like to pick up the first game, it's probably best to add it to your wishlist on Steam and wait for the price to drop to zero next week.
What do you think of the Planet Explorers multiplayer code being deleted? Are you interested in picking up the sequel? Let us know in the comments below!
